Contribution
I thank the Minister for his statement, and for advance sight of it. I also thank the campaigners on this issue, with whom I worked for more than five years—both as a Back Bencher and as a Front Bencher—and, indeed, I thank Lord Beamish and Lord Arbuthnot for their work on the Horizon compensation advisory board, which we established on a cross-party basis during our tenure.
I agree with the Minister that, although good progress has been made, there is much more to do. It is good that £892 million has been paid to 6,200 sub-postmasters, a tenfold increase on what we saw only a couple of years ago. It is clear that most of that has gone out of the door because of what this Parliament did last June, when it overturned the convictions by statute, and because of the introduction of fixed-sum awards, which have revolutionised the ability to pay compensation quickly.
I am proud to say that we did all that in the House on a cross-party basis, and it was the right thing to do. I worked with the then shadow Secretary of State for Business and Trade and with this Minister and others in their former roles, and our work was strongly supported by the then Prime Minister, my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond and Northallerton (Rishi Sunak), the then Business Secretary, who is now Leader of the Opposition, and the then Chancellor and his Ministers. I am therefore a little disappointed that the Minister has sought to suggest that he took over a crisis.
We have made much progress on this matter on a cross-party basis, and my remarks today will continue to be made on that basis, but for all the progress the Minister talked about in his statement, I did not hear about a single aspect of the Horizon programme that was not already in train under the last Government, in conjunction with the then Opposition. The Minister mentioned a three and a half-fold increase in July, which I welcome, but as he will no doubt concede, it happened as a result of the overturning of the convictions by Parliament and the introduction of the compensation schemes. The redress scheme, for example, was set in train by the last Government with the co-operation of the then Opposition, as was the investigation of Capture.
The Minister says that the compensation was not budgeted for, but that is not right. Last year’s Budget simply said that the money had been reallocated from departmental expenditure to annual managed expenditure. He implies that the money was not there to pay out to postmasters, when the work had been done on a cross-party basis. It is absolutely wrong to give that impression to people out there who are still waiting for redress. The HSS appeals system was something that we advocated for and put in place, as were the fixed-sum awards for overturned convictions and the Horizon shortfall scheme.
The Minister talks about the unstable leadership of the Post Office. We thought it was right to put a new chair in place, and we have every confidence that Nigel Railton, whom we put in place, will do a fantastic job. We support his transformation plan and the move to a fully franchised network, which we think is the right thing to do.
I will ask the Minister some questions, if I may. It is not clear what he will do about victims of the Capture programme, even though it has been acknowledged that the Post Office was at fault in some of those cases. Will he bring forward legislation to overturn their convictions by statute? I know the advisory board believes that that is the right way forward.
On compensation, when I was in the Minister’s role, I said that a named individual should oversee the compensation schemes, and the Business and Trade Committee has advocated for that. There should be one individual to oversee all the schemes, who will put their reputation on the line for delivering compensation. Although the fixed-sum awards are working, the full assessment route still has problems. Something that the Minister did not mention in his statement, but which we looked at, was a pilot of a more tariff-based scheme, whereby people who have suffered from mental health difficulties could be paid more rapidly, rather than going down a full assessment route.
The Minister mentions the timescales. Currently, there is a time parameter of 40 days for a response from the Department to a new claim, but the clock is reset when the claimant says that the claim is at the wrong level. Will he look at that?
What progress has the Minister made on an interim payment from Fujitsu? What progress has been made on establishing what Ernst and Young should have done in 2011-12, when it was aware of the huge liabilities that the Post Office had on its books due to this particular problem? Will he be ambitious on the banking framework to make sure that postmasters get a good deal, and what progress has the chair made on his commitment to reduce the highest-paid roles in the Post Office’s central management tier to make sure that more of the revenue that flows into the Post Office flows out to postmasters?